Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Lighthouses- 6 feet to 6 inches ...

We had a great week at Vacation Bible School - 400 on site every day- and the Island Odyssey theme was a blast! I made this scene as our "photo booth." We take a picture of each child in the themed scene and then they make a picture frame to fit the theme for their picture. These are "keepers." I have years and years of these from when College Girl was at VBS. ( You never outgrow VBS- College Girl came home on Monday and Thursday so she could be at VBS to help and then she drove back to school for her Summer classes!)

The lighthouse is over 6 feet tall!! It is made from a concrete form that I bought at an industrial construction company. I spray painted it to match the one in the VBS booklet. I made the "beacon" from a large plastic container that had contained puffed cheese snacks. I spray painted the inside of it white and put white Christmas lights in it. I painted the lid black and glued on a couple of black recycled plastic lids. I put some beachy looking plants on each side, added a palm tree and sand buckets and we were good to go! The back drop is a tri-fold of 4x8 plywood panels and I painted the ocean background on it. It's the closest I've gotten to the beach in a while!! I could almost feel the sand between my toes...

We wanted every child to have a lighthouse to take home so we came up with a way for everyone to make a lighthouse with a "real" light!

These are made from red plastic cups that I got at Wal Mart- 4/$1.00. Score. We let the children wrap white contact paper around the cup to make the stripes on the lighthouse. Did you know the design on a lighthouse is called the daymark??

The older children had baby food jars for the light and the preschoolers had small plastic cups. We hot glued those on and then they glued recycled bottle caps together to make the tops. The best part??

We gave every child a battery operated tea light to put in their lighthouse!! They loved it!!!!

Their lighthouse "really" lit up !!!

Here's the tropical beachy frame we made for our pictures:

The backing is a recycled cereal box. We cut them into 8x10 rectangles and then decoupaged squares of bright tissue paper onto the plain side. We added waves, a palm tree, and shell shapes cut from fun foam. Very tropical and colorful :)

A bonus to all of this?? One of the VBS volunteers is a teacher and they are supposed to have a "wow" in their classroom for the start of school... Guess what her "wow" is going to be?? Yep, we are recycling. She is going to have a beach scene with a lighthouse over 6 feet tall!!